On Saturday, December 2nd, BEAM LA hosted a math competition at the University of Southern California (USC) for partner middle school students. Forty students from grades 6-8 participated in a group round and individual round, solving puzzly math problems alongside their peers.

The students were deeply engaged in the problems; some students continued working on the problems during lunch and break time, even after submitting their answers! Here's what some students had to say:

-Abraham, 6th grader

-Ava, 6th grader

Isabella, 7th grader

There were two problems in the individual round that stumped all the participants. Can you solve one?

How many whole numbers from 100 to 999 (including 100 and 999) have no two digits next to each other that are the same? (For example, 121 is good, but 322 and 112 are not).

Pictured below are the top 2 performers from each grade level. The top winning teams were from UCLA CS and Synergy Kinetic.

A big thanks goes to: all of our participating schools and students, the USC Math Department and Viterbi School EOP for sponsoring the event, and MATHCOUNTS and The Art of Problem Solving for allowing us to use their problems in the competition.